When it comes to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, NVIDIA is heavily invested on the hardware side of things with products like its Tesla GPU accelerators and the DGX Station. Those AI efforts are also fully on display with the DRIVE PX platform that is powering today's semi-autonomous vehicles.

However, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang believes that his company's hardware efforts are advancing fast enough, and that automotive partners will be capable of delivering fully autonomous vehicles on the road within four years. That is, however, if governmental regulations can keep up with the rapid advancement of technology.

“It will take no more than 4 years to have fully autonomous cars on the road," said Huang when speaking with reports at an NVIDIA event in Taipei, Taiwan. "How long it takes for the vast majority of cars on the road to become that, it really just depends."

NVIDIA is increasingly seeing more of its revenue coming from its hardware AI efforts, and the DRIVE PX platform could help further drive financials for the company in the coming years. NVDA is actually up nearly 100 percent since the start of 2017 and is showing no signs of slowing down.

Just over two weeks ago, NVIDIA showed off its NVIDIA DRIVE PX Pegasus platform for autonomous vehicles. DRIVE PX Pegasus is powered by two Xavier SoCs that include Volta-based GPUs. This new autonomous driving platform can perform 320 million operations per second, making it 10x more powerful than its predecessor.

“Creating a fully self-driving car is one of society’s most important endeavors — and one of the most challenging to deliver. The breakthrough AI computing performance and efficiency of Pegasus is crucial for the industry to realize this vision," said Huang at the time.

“Driverless cars will enable new ride- and car-sharing services. New types of cars will be invented, resembling offices, living rooms or hotel rooms on wheels. Travelers will simply order up the type of vehicle they want, based on their destination and activities planned along the way. The future of society will be reshaped."